Some recent deadly attacks on mental health workers, as experts point to safety lapses

While experts agree the majority of people with mental illness are not violent, workplace violence has claimed the lives of several professionals in recent years, including:

— Dr. Wayne Fenton, renowned psychiatrist and administrator at the National Institute of Mental Health, whom a teenager with schizophrenia beat to death during an emergency visit at Fenton's private office in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2006.

— Dr. Louis Martin, psychiatrist who died 10 days after a mentally ill man punched him at a state hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2007, fracturing his skull.

— New York City psychotherapist Kathryn Faughey, killed in 2008 with a meat cleaver, another knife and a mallet by a man with schizophrenia who seriously wounded her officemate, a psychiatrist whom the assailant had seen years earlier.

— Nurse Michael Schaab, killed at a psychiatric hospital on the University of Pittsburgh campus in 2012 by a gunman with schizophrenia who also shot five other employees.